100 Francs Delacroix type 1978 continuous printing

The "Delacroix" hundred-franc note had an unusually long production run — introduced in 1978 and kept in service well into the early 1990s, by which point it was thoroughly worn out of French public affection. The Banque de France's own workshops handled all printing, with engraving split between Henri Renaud and Jacques Jubert, a division of labor that occasionally produced subtle tonal inconsistencies between sheets from different press runs.

Fontanarosa's design work here belongs to a transitional moment in French note production, before the more sophisticated security architectures that would define the subsequent Cézanne series. The watermark remains the primary anti-counterfeiting measure — modest by later standards.